BLACK AND REDClass Struggle Road to Negro Freedom

I. Introduction

The struggle of the Negro people for freedom and equality has been
the most dynamic struggle going on in the United States in the past ten years.
It has taken place in the context of, and has been conditioned by, the general
passivity of the organized labor movement. The militancy of the Negro people
and the tempo of their struggle increased enormously in the fifties and early
sixties, but the achievements have been minimal--limited entirely to token
advancement of democratic rights. In fact, the fundamental conditions of life
for the vast majority of Black people, particularly in the key areas of
employment, wages, housing and education, have worsened. The Civil
Rights movement, geared to the aspirations of the small Negro middle class,
though professing to speak for all Negroes, has been stopped dead in its tracks
in dealing with these fundamental needs, and in fact has functioned partly as a
brake on the unorganized and leaderless pressures from below. In the absence of
an alternative, revolutionary, leadership these pressures and frustrations
explode from time to time in undirected, non-political outbursts that change
nothing. Thus in the midst of dissipating militancy, disillusionment in
struggle and seemingly vain aspirations among the black masses, the movement is
at an impasse. A crisis of leadership is the essence of this impasse.

Economic Prospects

At present U.S. capitalism is attempting to maintain and increase
its profits by placing the cost of the Viet Nam war on the working class.

The prolonged and extensive expansion of the productive capacity
of the U.S. following upon the Second World War was conditioned by the massive
destruction engendered by the imperialist slaughter, and by the world-wide
demand for goods which resulted. The period of rapid capitalist development
since the war has been marked by periodic mild recessions and interspersed by
long periods of boom. Recently the curve of world capitalist development has
begun to point downward. The rise in inventories, the drop in investments in
capital goods production, and in industrial production, indicate that a
world-wide economic downturn is at hand.

While economic indicators pointed to a downturn in 1966, the boom
was prolonged another year by the political decision to escalate the aggressive
war against Viet Nam. A decision by the U.S. ruling class for another massive
escalation could again serve to postpone the downturn.

The upsurge of militant strike action testifies to the growing
refusal of workers to submit to further erosion of their living standards by
the inflationary pressures generated by the war on a booming economy, and to
their readiness to fight for real gains. Black workers, bearing an even greater
disproportionate share of the burden of the war, would be the most militant and
ready for greater struggle.

On the other hand, if the war is ended or even continued at the
present level of war spending, the economic downturn would prevail. While the
black workers would be hit hardest by the ensuing unemployment, lay-offs would
also rapidly accelerate among white workers. Again, this poses the perspective
of a unity in struggle of black and white workers, and a leap in the level of
consciousness of basic sectors of the working class.

Black Workers and Imperialism

Thus the struggle for Negro freedom takes place not only within
the national arena, but within an international context. U.S. capitalism, which
doubly exploits black workers, is the cornerstone of world imperialism. The
abandonment of a perspective which looks to the working class to lead
the struggle for the liberation of mankind from oppression is the hallmark of
all revisionism. The Pabloist concept that the epicenter of world revolution
has shifted to the colonial countries, the Maoist concept that backward
countries will encircle and conquer the industrial countries, and the black
nationalist concept that the Negro people are essentially part of the movement
of African nationalism and will be liberated by the industrially backward
countries are all revisionist concepts.

The bankruptcy of revisionism has become apparent with the
smashing of the so-called "Third World," "Socialist" regimes and the tragic
massacres of the masses in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The definitive
victory of the world revolution will only be secured by a victory of the
workers in the advanced capitalist countries. The U.S. working class now has
"the most revolutionary of all revolutionary tasks," the destruction of the
bastion of world imperialism, the U.S. capitalist system. To the extent that
the black workers, the most militant in the U.S. working class, become infused
with a revolutionary socialist perspective, and thereby become able to provide
leadership to the class as a whole, they play a vital role in the success of
the world revolution.

II. Integration Or Separation?

From their arrival in this country, the Negro people have been
an integral part of American class society while at the same time
forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society. As chattel slaves
they were the labor force on which the Southern planter aristocracy maintained
its economic and political dominance until the Civil War. Various factors--the
variety of African origins, the deliberate dispersal of slaves with common
tribal backgrounds, the fact that most slaves brought from Africa were
male--facilitated the total destruction of African languages, social
institutions and cultural memories among the slaves and allowed the imposition
of a new language and new habits to fit the needs of the economic system into
which they were being integrated. In particular, an eclectic Christianity was
early instilled to teach the slave to meekly accept his position.

Escape from slavery, not return to Africa, was the goal of Negro
efforts toward freedom during the pre-Civil War period. In the Civil War
itself, when the political needs of the vigorous and growing capitalist class
in the North came into fundamental conflict with the continued political
dominance of the Southern planters, freed slaves played an important part in
the victory of the progressive forces and destruction of the slave system.

Capitalist and slave alike stood to gain from the suppression of
the planter aristocracy but beyond that had no further common interests. In
fact, it was the Negroes themselves who, within the protective framework
provided by the Reconstruction Acts and the military dictatorship of the
occupying Union army, carried through the social revolution and destruction of
the old planter class. However, the Compromise of 1877 and the formation of a
powerful new bloc of Northern industrial capital and subordinate Southern
Bourbons allowed the majority of ex-slaves to be forced back onto the land as
tenant farmers or share-croppers.

Southern Populism

Nevertheless, nearly a quarter of the ex-slaves were able to
acquire their own small farms. The white small farmers, who had also been
"freed" by the destruction of the slave system, were driven in some cases to
join hands with their black counterparts in the defense of their common
interests against the new plantation masters. Yet this tentative union--the
Southern Populist Movement--was doomed to failure. The small-farmer class
itself could not be a real contender for political power in a capitalist
society, while the dynamics of private farming inevitably brought about sharp
competition among the farmers. This competition was exploited by the new
political alliance of big planters, Southern capitalists and certain Northern
financial interests, in particular, investors in Southern railroads, land,
mining and timber. This bloc initiated a campaign of violent race hatred among
their political opponents which succeeded in destroying the developing
black-white unity. In the context of the new racism the Black people were
disenfranchised, stripped of all legal rights, and permanently denied access to
adequate education. Those setbacks were codified into a series of laws
institutionalizing the rigid segregation which has been the dominant feature of
the South ever since. It was the racism launched during this period which has
since kept wages in the South at approximately half those of the rest of the
country (and wages of Negroes at half those of whites in the country as a
whole), prevented effective union organization and perpetuated a crushing
poverty on the land for black and white alike, though today the Southern
economy has come entirely under the control of Northern capital.

By the First World War 90 per cent of all Negroes still lived in
the South, though by this time nearly one million had made their way from the
land into hundreds of Southern towns. Then, with the great expansion of demand
for unskilled labor unleashed by the War, a vast migration of black workers
into the North took place, and for the first time a sizeable portion of Black
people became integrated into the mainstream of American capitalist society.
This integration did not last. With the 1921 recession the new workers found
themselves forced out of their jobs. This, along with the extremely harsh
conditions of Northern ghetto life--instead of the "Promised Land" which many
had expected--caused thousands in despair and frustration to turn to the
"Garvey Movement" built on the thesis that the Negro would never receive
justice in the white man's land and calling for a separatist solution. This
first important mass movement with nationalist aims folded later in the '20s
due to internal contradictions, the imprisonment of its leader and the recovery
in Negro employment in the boom years following the post-war depression. Far
more significant during this decade in terms of American social reality was the
successful organization of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

During the '30s once again black workers were forced out of the
economy in large numbers--but this time not alone. Radical ideologies and the
gains of mass struggle made a deep impact among workers of both races. The
organization of the CIO--the culmination of the upsurge in labor struggle--was
a joint venture and bound large numbers of the less skilled and unprotected
black workers to the most advanced section of the proletariat. Yet the
betrayals of the Communist Party during the war years helped wipe out Negro
gains and served to discredit all radical movements, even though a
significant number of Negro workers came into the Socialist Workers Party at
this time. The subordination of the CIO to the bourgeois Democratic Party and
Cold War ideology, its affiliation with the conservative AFL and its failure in
the context of unexampled prosperity and labor passivity to come to the defense
of the Negro freedom struggle have caused black militants to lose confidence in
the organized labor movement or in the perspective of common struggle in the
future. The SWP's failure to take a clear position on integration vs.
separation contributed to its loss of hundreds of black workers and of the
opportunity to forge a significant black Trotskyist cadre.

But the objective basis for future common struggle of black and
white workers not only exists but, unlike the Populist Movement of black
and white farmers, holds the promise of success, while struggle along
nationalist lines is a delusion and an impossibility. The vast majority of
Black people--both North and South--are today workers who, along with the rest
of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure
the necessities of life to those who buy labor power in order to make profit.
The buyers of labor power, the capitalists, are a small minority whose rule is
maintained only by keeping the majority who labor for them divided and misled.
The fundamental division created deliberately along racial lines has kept the
Negro workers who entered American capitalism at the bottom, still at the
bottom. Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with the
rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an
egalitarian, socialist society.

Yet the struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom,
while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that
struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main
comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. Because of
the generations of exceptional oppression, degradation and humiliation, Black
people as a group have special needs and problems necessitating additional and
special forms of struggle. It is this part of the struggle which has begun
today, and from which the most active and militant sections of Black people
will gain a deep education and experience in the lessons of struggle. Because
of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and
experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an
exceptional role in the coming American revolution.

"Pseudo-Nationalism"

Black nationalism accepts present American class society and
working-class divisions as unchanging and unchangeable, and from this static
vantage point separation is seen as the only solution. Yet this solution is
unrealizable in terms of the realities of American class society. True
nationalism is, in essence, the struggle to establish an independent area for
the development of a separate political economy. Historically it has
come at those times and in those places, usually within a common geographical
area among those with a common language and cultural heritage, when an emerging
capitalist class must free itself from the shackles of a decayed feudal economy
or from external imperialism in order to develop freely, i.e., in order to
exploit its "own" working class. But there is practically no black capitalist
class in America. Instead, the so-called "Black Bourgeoisie" consists in
reality of a small, weak, petty-bourgeoisie catering to service needs arising
out of segregation, and of white collar workers--which latter are rapidly
achieving a remarkable degree of integration into the white middle class, and
thus have an identity of interests and outlook far removed from those of the
majority of working-class Negroes.

The present mood among black ghetto youth, "nationalism," could
more correctly be termed "pseudo-nationalism" since the conditions fostering
genuine nationalist sentiment do not exist. This mood arises from growing
racial self-confidence and pride--a positive development as it is a
precondition for real combativeness--coupled with bitterness at the failure of
the struggle to gain significant results without support from the rest of the
working class. It develops in the context of a generally correct criticism of
the middle-class oriented Civil Rights leadership while an alternate,
proletarian leadership has not yet been created. The dominant feature of this
pseudo-nationalism, like all variants of black nationalism, is its inability to
generate a program of struggle--a further proof of its spurious nature. Such
"nationalism" is divisive and interferes with the development of class
consciousness and a program to sharpen class struggle.

Thus the Negro struggle in America is more directly related to the
class struggle than any essentially national question could be. The falling
rate of profit makes it impossible for the ruling class, even during a spurt of
unequalled prosperity, to meet the demands of this super-exploited layer for
improvements in the basic conditions of their lives. Hence any steps
forward in this struggle immediately pose the class question and the need for
class struggle in its sharpest form.

III. Broad Tasks

Transitional Organization

The necessity for mass organizations of strata of working people
with special needs and problems was recognized by the Leninist Comintern, which
worked out the tactics of the relationship of such transitional organizations
to the revolutionary party and to the class struggle as a whole. These
organizations are a part of the revolutionary movement, and their
struggles advance the overall class struggle. They are neither substitutes
for nor opponents of the vanguard party of the entire class, but are
linked to the vanguard party through their most conscious cadres.
Examples of transitional organizations are militant women's organizations,
revolutionary youth leagues, and radical trade-union caucuses. Such a
transitional organization is necessary for Negro workers at a time when large
sections of the working class are saturated with race hatred.

With its program of transitional struggle around the felt needs of
a section of the class, the organization mobilizes serious struggle by the
largest possible number. Such an organization, while not itself "socialist,"
leads those participating in its struggles to the realization that a
fundamental overturn of the existing society is necessary.

In the Northern ghettoes a great organizational vacuum exists. The
objective basis of the traditional middle-class organizations such as CORE and
the NAACP is growing ever narrower as more and more of the Negro middle class
is able to flee the ghetto. (For example, over the past decade, 40,000 employed
Negroes moved from Harlem into other, more "desirable" parts of the city or
suburbs, where their incomes were sufficient to break some of the barriers of
segregation. The Harlem CORE chapter recently has had only a few active members
who actually reside in Harlem!) As the objective basis of these groups narrows,
they grow subjectively ever less related to the needs and interests of the
black masses. This is reflected in the move towards an increasingly consistent
position by the middle-class groups that since the basic problems are economic,
government intervention--secured by pressures on or within the Democratic
Party--must be the primary aim of the Civil Rights movement. In 1964-65 this
took the guise of "Liberal Coalition" politics as expounded most articulately
by Bayard Rustin, and the delivery of the black vote to Johnson. This year's
guise are the more militant-sounding slogans of "Black Power" and "independent
political action" as interpreted by certain Northern Civil Rights leaders to
mean black judges, black cops and black Democrats or, as regards "independent"
political action, to mean a black voting bloc which will supposedly "swing" its
vote to whichever capitalist party promises the most to Negroes. The ultimate
meaning of the latter is to build support for Bobby Kennedy's projected
presidential candidacy. As the old Civil Rights movement becomes more and more
subordinated to the political arm of the very forces responsible for the
oppression of the Negro people, it will serve increasingly to function
solely as a brake on real struggle and a diversion from revolutionary
alternatives.

Oppose Federal Infiltration

Furthermore, these reformist organizations have already become so
exposed in their ineffectiveness, even in gaining token reforms, that the
government has found it necessary to create its own reformist organizations in
order that some alternative to proletarian organization and program will
exist. The millions of dollars poured into HARYOU-ACT have succeeded in
confusing or buying off a large number of potential youth leaders in Harlem
through a combination of money and pseudo-radical nationalistic rhetoric. The
so-called "anti-poverty" projects have also served to foster a certain amount
of illusions among the ghetto masses. The witch hunt in Mobilization for Youth
when some idealistic young people tried to use it as a vehicle for support to
rent strikes, school boycotts and community actions against police brutality
shows clearly the outcome of attempting to use government fronts as instruments
of real struggle.

The vast black ghettoes of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Detroit and numerous other cities are wide open for the formation of a
proletarian mass organization of struggle. Only the smallness of the black
revolutionary cadre, together with the temporary aftermath of police terror
during the "riots," and in some cases sectarianism, have kept such
organizations small. The Spartacist League will do all in its power to
encourage and aid such organizations, and favors the unity in action of all
working-class oriented organizations in the ghetto.

Ghetto Defense

For the last three summers ghettoes across the country have been
rocked by elemental, spontaneous, non-political upheavals against the
prevailing property relations and against the forces of the state which protect
these relations. In no case have they been genuine race riots. The risings have
usually been provoked by the police, in the course of "normal" brutalities
(Watts 1965) or in an effort to crush a movement which is exceeding the bounds
set for it by bourgeois society (Harlem 1964). As the struggle against the
police expands, the black street-fighters turn on the merchants and
shopkeepers, the visible representatives of the oppressive class society, and
smash whatever cannot be carried off. Yet despite the vast energies expanded
and the casualties suffered, these outbreaks have changed nothing. This is a
reflection of the urgent need for organizations of real struggle, which can
organize and direct these energies toward conscious political objectives. It is
the duty of a revolutionary organization to intervene where possible to give
these outbursts political direction.

The Northern ghettoes will be organized only by revolutionary
ghetto organizations. The beginning of such organization is possible now, while
the form remains open. One form is the building of block and neighborhood
councils based on tenants councils. Experience has shown that tenants councils
must be introduced to the whole transitional program and tied to as
broad an organizational base as possible if they are to achieve stability.
Block and neighborhood councils of this sort would be able to speak for a whole
area, put forward their demands, and call out the people in militant actions to
back up those demands.

One of the most important functions of such representative popular
organs would be the organization and direction of effective self-defense
against police and racist violence. The potential for rapid growth by the
American fascist movement adds to the seriousness of this task, given the sharp
contradictions confronting U.S. capitalism in the next period. Ghetto action
might take the form of block patrols of neighborhood men, preferably union
members with past military training. The need for the immediate formation of
such patrols is shown by the indiscriminate beatings and killings by police
during the suppression of ghetto "riots."

Such terror will be unleashed whenever the black people approach a
breakthrough in changing the fundamental condition of their lives. Block
patrols would also help prevent the day-to-day acts of terror against
individual ghetto residents by racist cops and would serve to control the crime
victimizing ghetto residents which the capitalist cops ignore or participate
in. Such neighborhood patrols will become a part of that workers militia which
will defend the future American proletarian revolution.

Independent Political Action

The struggle for black freedom demands the total break of the
Negro people from the Democratic Party, the preferred political weapon of the
forces which profit from the suppression and super-exploitation of the Negro
people. The only alternative is a new party based on the needs of the poor and
working people. The formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in
the South, initially with a mass base, indicated the potential and feeling
which exist for independent political action. However, the MFDP, as its name
indicated, was not independent but was simply a means whereby certain Southern
and Northern civil rights leaders hoped to pursue their ambitions within the
national Democratic Party at the expense of the interests of the Negro people.
This situation has since been recognized by the most militant sections of the
Southern movement, and the party has now lost its mass support.

The formation of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County,
Alabama, was a step forward inasmuch as it was consciously organized in
opposition to the Democratic Party. Based on the sharecroppers and farmers
of a single rural blackbelt county, its program is by these very factors
limited to reforms realizable within the system such as improved schools and
roads, development of farmer cooperatives, and purchase of land for
dispossessed sharecroppers. In order to go beyond these albeit needed reforms
and pose a real challenge to the Southern system and the basic structure of
society, the idea of independent political action must be extended to the
cities and developed among workers. The perspective of the Black Panther Party
for a federation of county-wide parties must be replaced by a perspective for a
South-wide Freedom Labor Party.

Only by the development of a working-class program and by
explicitly opening the door to support by white workers can real political
independence be maintained, real gains won and the basis laid for eventual
working-class political unity. This unity will come about when the exploited
section of the white South is driven into opposition and is compelled to forego
color prejudice in order to struggle along class lines against its real
enemies--the owners of land and industry.

The creation of a South-wide Freedom Labor Party would serve as a
tremendous impetus for similar action by Northern workers. The struggle for
such a party would necessitate a rank-and-file revolt within the organized
labor movement to overthrow the present labor bureaucracy. In the absence of a
labor party, the Spartacist League supports all independent candidates whose
programs are based on the needs of the ghettoes.

Negroes as Workers

In this period when primary attention has been focused on the
ghetto, the importance of Negro militants within the organized labor movement
must not be overlooked; black unionists form an immediate, existing,
organizational link with the white section of the working class. Militant Negro
and other super-exploited minority workers together with their labor partisans
must organize within and without the existing unions in order to fight for
their urgent needs. Union bureaucrats, with their public lip service to the
Civil Rights movement, will be hard put to suppress "Civil Rights" caucuses
within their unions or condemn Labor Civil Rights Committees as "dual unions."
Yet under conditions in which struggle reaches revolutionary heights, such
committees would be precursors to factory committees. Should dual power be
posed, these in turn would be vital elements in workers councils and, in
victory, of workers power.

In addition to anti-discrimination demands, the "CR" caucuses
should raise the following demands:

Organization of the Unorganized. At the same time this
demand is raised, the black worker militants should themselves begin this
organization.

Organization by the Unions of the Unemployed. Again,
this demand should be accompanied by the actual organization of unemployed
workers by the black worker militants. The aim is to create links between the
ghetto and the labor movement and to counteract the lumpenization process
proceeding apace in the ghettoes among the unemployed. Welfare recipients
should be organized around a program calling for full employment and their
organizations should be associated with welfare worker unions.

For a Sliding Scale of Wages Controlled by Labor. All
workers are being hit hard by inflation caused by the war in Viet Nam. The
bourgeoisies attempts to freeze wages to save profits must be countered
by the demand that wages be scaled according to the purchasing power of the
dollar, with the power of the sliding scale in the hands of workers'
committees, not bourgeois agencies.

Fight for the Shorter Work Week. The rate of Negro
unemployment is twice that of white workers, and the gap is increasing. Yet
white workers also face the threat of unemployment due to automation. The
struggle for more jobs for all, rather than competition between
black and white workers for a few jobs here or there, can unite workers. At the
same time, the demand for a shorter work week poses racial equality in union
hiring without making the white worker fear for his job.

Oppose Government Intervention. At all times we oppose
using the Government to "integrate" unions, and rely solely on the working
class for this task. Such ruling class tactics as decertification of
discriminatory unions are intended to destroy union independence, foster
division among union members and worsen the position of all workers.

For Negroes the fight for full employment at decent wages is not
just the key to better housing, schools, etc., but a fundamental and necessary
defense. If Black people are forced out of any economic role and become
lumpenized as a group they will be in a position to be used as a scapegoat and
could be totally wiped out during a future social crisis--just as the Jews in
Germany were--without affecting the economy. The fight must be fought now
to maintain Negroes as part of the working class.

The struggle for this program within the labor unions will entail
a simultaneous fight for full union democracy and ultimately a struggle for
leadership against the present labor lieutenants of capital. The most essential
feature of this struggle will be the break of the labor movement from all its
present ties to the capitalist state.

IV. The South

The Southern economy is today controlled entirely by Northern
capital and is an integral and essential part of American
capitalism. The contradictions of capitalism culminating in the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall necessitate the maintenance of this vast area of low
wage, non-unionized labor as a source of super-profits, and prohibit either any
fundamental improvement in living standards for Southern workers whatever their
color or any real change in the Southern political system of terror against
Negroes. The problem of the South is more than merely one problem among many in
the capitalist system. U.S. capitalism can oftentimes remove some problems
through reforms in the system, always of course at the expense of exacerbating
problems elsewhere. But the Southern system lies at the very heart of
American capitalism; its essentials cannot be removed without destroying
capitalism itself. Yet capitalism in the course of its own development has
now created in the South a Negro proletariat larger than the rural Negro
population and brought together black and white workers in the social process
of production. Thereby the objective basis is laid by capitalism itself for a
future revolutionary struggle against the inhuman Southern system.

Because only a direct anti-capitalist struggle can eradicate the
Southern system, any struggle short of that must soon either turn against
capitalism or else fall into a swamp of hopeless reformism and soul searching.
Perhaps the most critical problem of the Southern Negro struggle has been its
lack of revolutionary theory. Much energy and much blood have been sacrificed,
but the gains have been few. The struggle has gone slowly as the movement has
painstakingly groped its way along, hammering out by trial-and-error a program
and method of struggle which is still in flux.

Without any theoretical weapons, the movement first struck out
blindly but boldly at the most immediate signs of oppression--segregation in
public transportation, eating places, educational institutions, etc. The basic
demand was equality within the system, while the method of struggle was
dominated by non-violence. This struggle reached its height in the early
1960s with the sit-ins, Freedom rides, Old Miss confrontation, etc. A
good deal of publicity was achieved, but the system was basically untouched. As
if to indicate the reformist nature of the demands, the bourgeoisie adopted the
entire Civil Rights program and called it the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But the civil rights movement was beginning to learn several
important lessons. It was learning that one cannot merely make demands--one
must have political power. What kind of political power was still
to be learned. The emphasis was on registration of Negroes for the vote. Once
again, though, the bourgeoisie adopted this basically reformist demand, this
time calling it the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But the bourgeoisie in the era of imperialism is so decadent, so
dependent upon reactionaries, that it can no longer extend even simple
bourgeois democratic rights. At this point, then, the Southern civil rights
movement was pushed outside the traditional two party system by the bourgeoisie
itself. At the 1964 Democratic Party Convention where the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party tried to enter the regular Democratic Party, the bourgeoisie
rejected this chance to absorb the Southern leadership and so pushed the
leadership into its more militant phase.

Rise of the Black Power Movement

The Negro movement in the South has been confronted with two
roads: reform vs. revolution, liberalism vs. communism. In recent years,
through trial-and-error, the movement has seen the bankruptcy of traditional
liberalism. The well-hated "white liberal" who dominated the earlier movement
insisted on confining the movement within the system, for a real social
overturn would threaten his class position. This attitude was held not only by
the white liberals, but also by the petty-bourgeois Negro leaders like Roy
Wilkins and Martin Luther King.

The most militant section of the civil rights movement has sensed
the inadequacy of traditional reformism, and its suspicions were empirically
confirmed by the experience of the MFDP. This healthy though empirical reaction
has its center in SNCC and the "black power" movement.

The adherents of "black power" are usually the most militant
elements who have adopted the term partly because of its militant sound and
partly because of its repugnance to white liberals. Thus the "black power"
movement contains a number of radical points and methods which have caused the
bourgeois press to shower vicious abuse on it. Some "black power" advocates
profess to reject middle-class values and desire to serve "human" values; they
generally favor independent political action such as the Black Panther Party in
Lowndes County; they see the connection between the Negro struggle at home and
anti-imperialist struggles abroad, as in SNCC's recent statement on Viet Nam;
and they discuss the use of armed self-defense against racist terror. In short,
the "black power" movement is raising questions whose answers lie outside
the framework set up by the capitalist class.

However, as yet the movement has not become consciously
anti-capitalist. It has rejected what it knows as liberalism but is unsure of
how to go further. Lacking a conscious orientation towards the working class,
and constantly surrounded by bourgeois propaganda, the movement may yet fall
prey to bourgeois politicians with radical phrases or else become hopelessly
isolated and demoralized.

Another facet of the "black power" movement is the proposition
that black militants should organize Black people and forget about whites for
now, since most whites are racist, and that it's a white man's job to organize
whites. But the achievement of Negro liberation depends on the
radicalization of white workers, and every class-conscious white worker means a
new ally for the Negro struggle. The lessons that black militants have gained
through bitter struggle can best be transmitted to white workers by these
militants making clear that their aim is to build an integrated anti-capitalist
movement, North and South. This means that the slogan "black power" must be
clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the "black
power" movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South.
The possibility of this is indicated by Stokely Carmichael's endorsement of the
so-called "National Conference for New Politics," a Social-Democratic front
group which is leaning towards Robert Kennedy for "peace" candidate for
President in 1968.

At this stage of the Southern struggle where the most militant
elements are groping for new solutions to the problems reformism is
demonstrably not able to overcome, the Spartacist League, as the only professed
revolutionary organization with any sort of base in the South, is in a unique
position to intervene in the movement to advance the development of consciously
anti-capitalist struggle.

Advancing the Southern Struggle

In addition to the programmatic points discussed earlier under
"Broad Tasks," additional demands are pertinent to the Southern struggle.

For a Southern Organizing Drive Backed by Organized Labor.
Organized labor is being hurt as many companies move South to tap the vast
source of cheap, unorganized Southern labor. Black workers meanwhile suffer
from low wages and little job security due to lack of unions. A labor-backed
Southern organizing drive would thus help both black and white workers. The
demand for a Southern drive is complementary to the demand for a Freedom Labor
Party, and, if achieved, would lay the material basis for such a party by
creating an organized Southern base.

Armed Self-Defense. While this slogan is also applicable
in the North, the demand has a more immediate urgency in the South and is
already being acted upon. The Deacons for Defense and Justice is a tremendous
step forward for the Negro struggle, not only because it saves lives, but
because it raises the level of consciousness of the civil rights movement by
discouraging reliance upon the institutions of the bourgeois state. However,
the Deacons exhibit a curious duality: highly militant, paramilitary tactics
are used to protect the struggle; however, their political perspectives are
characterized by comparatively mild, anti-discrimination politics. This
contradictory character will eventually result in a crisis which will reveal
the urgent need for revolutionary theory and program along with self-defense if
the social liberation of the Black people is to be achieved. The demand for
organized self-defense must be counterposed to Federal intervention which
preserves Southern "law and order" and the racial status quo.

For a Workers United Front Against Federal Intervention.
As the bourgeoisie loses political control of the working class, it
must rely more and more on direct Government controls, sometimes thinly
disguised as "arbitration panels," "wage guideposts," etc. In the recent
Machinists' strike a naked anti-strike bill was almost passed. In 1963 Federal
troops were deployed to prevent a threatened uprising by black workers in
Birmingham during a campaign of racist bombings. All workers have a vital
interest in opposing Federal intervention.

V. Black Workers and the Revolutionary Party

There is one state power in this country, and its destruction will
be accomplished only by a united working class under the leadership of a single
revolutionary vanguard party. The SWP's concept of the continued division of
the working class along color lines with two separate vanguards which would
coordinate their activities in a revolutionary period would be like having two
command centers during a war, issuing separate orders and disorganization and
confusion in the face of the wealthiest and most powerful ruling class in
history. The struggle against this concept of a federated vanguard is similar
to the struggle carried on by Lenin at the second congress of the Russian
Social Democratic Party against the Jewish Bund's demand for autonomy within
the party and for their sole right to work among Jewish workers. Trotsky argued
that to grant such autonomy to one group would in effect be granting autonomy
to any particular section of the working class, i.e., would be the institution
of a federated party and the destruction of a centralized organization, in
addition to an explicit challenge to an internationalist outlook. As it is the
goal of socialism to sweep away national and racial barriers, a socialist
organization struggles to overcome such barriers. Furthermore, the perpetuation
of a "dual vanguard" concept within the United States would actually prevent
the struggle from reaching a revolutionary level. Only common struggle
for common aims can unite the working class and overcome the lifelong
racial prejudices of American workers.

Our immediate goal is to develop a black Trotskyist cadre. We aim
not only to recruit Negro members--a short-cut to the working class in this
period--but to develop these black workers into Trotskyist cadres who will
carry a leadership role in organizing the black masses, within the League
itself, and elsewhere. As Trotsky said:

"We must say to the conscious elements of the Negroes
that they are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the
working class.... If it happens that we...are not able to find the road to this
stratum, then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the
rest would be only a lie."

In recruiting and holding a Negro cadre there are several
problems:

Color hostility. Only the demonstrated determination of
the Spartacist League to carry through its revolutionary tasks will convince
black militants to join and remain in our ranks. To avoid disappointment and
demoralization, we must make clear to our black recruits that only the patient
construction and theoretical preparation of a revolutionary vanguard party will
produce significant results.

Class and educational differences. At present a
predominant number of recruits to any radical organization are from the middle
class. In addition whites in the U.S. as a whole have access to more and better
formal education than Negroes. These factors, to the extent that they are
reflected in our organization, may create a certain social gulf between black
and white members. This gulf will only be overcome through conscious, common
struggle, and the education of all our members in Marxist theory and practice.

Daily oppression and the problems of life. The struggle
for livelihood and the immediate problems of daily life create additional
pressures on our black members which draw them away from full participation in
the revolutionary movement. Our black comrades should be aided in gaining job
skills that will make the immediate day-to-day problems of living less pressing
and free them for revolutionary activity and concentration.

Over-Activism. Because the Negro struggle has been the
most active struggle in the country, our Negro members have been intensely
active party members. The demands of the mass organizations in which they
participate tend to occupy so much time that little is left for the study of
Marxist theory and the lessons of past class struggle. Unless there is a
balance between these two forms of activity our goal of creating a black
Trotskyist cadre to intervene in the mass struggle and lift it to a higher
consciousness of its anti-capitalist goals will not be realized. The Spartacist
League is confident that it will be able to overcome these problems and create
an integrated revolutionary vanguard capable of reaching and eventually uniting
in struggle the entire class.

Final Victory

The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be
achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers under the
leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of this struggle
unbreakable bonds will be forged between the two sections of the working class.
The success of the struggle will place the Negro people in a position to insure
at last the end of slavery, racism and super-exploitation.

--General line unanimously adopted and Editorial Commission
appointed by Founding Conference, 4 September 1966.

--Report of Negro Commission on revisions accepted by Political
Bureau, 27 March 1967.